05/02/2015

Natalia happens to live on downtown Winslow, on Bainbridge Island, not far from where I live, so we know each other.

As I explained below in my short introduction to the class for the students, I always considered that images were essential to advocacy and I was fortunate to work with immensely talented and generous graphic artists like Jean-Michel Folon (papier recyclé), Jean-Claude Marol (anti-tabac), Gérard Paris-Clavel (antitabac, Jean-Paul Signoret), Alain Le Quernec (La pub tue).

After I co-founded in March 2014 the baby start-up union, Temporary Workers of America I looked for images that could carry the messages we care about, especially about various paid leaves: I could not find any.

I thought that maybe Natalia could help since she was teaching design in an art school.

Miracle of synchronicity, when I contacted her in February 2015, she was looking for an organization her design for social change class could work for, producing pro bono posters and other images and videos.

The students accepted to work for Temporary Workers of America and voilà!

Below is the text I shared with the students before they started working on this project.

A personal introduction of Temporary Workers of America by Philippe Boucher for the students of the Design for Social Change class

Dear All,

Yesterday I had a long talk with Natalia at the Blackbird Cafe (she had tea) and I told her about our story.

Today I thought it would be appropriate for me to tell you a bit about us, Temporary Workers of America, before you start brainstorming.

First I want to thank you for your concern and your upcoming contribution: it is much appreciated.

It's the same for us now: good art is inspiring, it nourishes your spirit and your determination, it makes you smile and it tells in one vivid image all or a lot of what you are trying to achieve and why, or it just associate what you are doing with beauty.

I think it's very important. Not everybody does but as design students I hope you do.

I told our story in a short book (available in e-book and print on demand format and for free for you in word format, attached if you prefer it that way): The Other Microsoft.

The cover is a copycat of the cover of Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the 21st century because I think our story is very much about inequality and it is also a reference to a classic book by Michael Harrington, The Other America, about how invisible poor people are and how prevalent poverty is.

Natalia told me some of you are temporary workers so you probably, unfortunately, know about precarious jobs with low wages and no benefits: that's what we want to change.

For our small lab (about 40 people) but also for all the people impacted: 2 co-workers recently became dads but they had 0 paid parental leave, could not afford to take unpaid time off and had to work overtime to compensate for the time they eventually still decided to spend with their new born and their spouse.

If they had been with a different employer they could have had 4 weeks of parental leave at full pay.

We think it's possible for corporations, especially corporations that are highly profitable to provide their employees, even the ones at the bottom, with higher wages and full benefits: paid sick leave (we are not based in Seattle so it's not mandatory), paid parental leave, paid vacation. This is already that way in most/all industrialized countries, but the US.

I just told you the four main themes we are looking for inspiring images about.

We are also looking for images that could serve as big format identity cards for us. How can you imagine such images? Feel completely free to try to seduce prospective audiences with a beautiful image.

That's what we'd like to have. Images people (anybody really) would like to have because they enjoy looking at it, with somewhere our TWA signature, in a very unobstrusive way or whatever way you want to insert it.

Maybe you wonder what type of union, we are. We are a baby union, a start up union: none of us had ever been within a union before, none of us has any experience about what a union is supposed to be like. We don't care for and don't carry all the bad images that have eventually been affixed to existing established unions. All we know is that we think that joining together we stand a better chance to obtain something from our employer for all of us than by trying alone and only for ourself.

We were just tired and fed up of the way we are treated and wanted to try out something to change it.

We have tried the going alone way and it did not work. Not that we got anything yet and maybe at the end we'll get nothing but at least we'll have tried and we'll have invited you to create art in the process, art that could contribute to bring social change.

I hope all I wrote is not too abstract and vague. There are more details in the book and on our blogs.

Feel free to send me questions and I'll try to answer them as promptly as possible.